Posts by Doctor Syntax 40559 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Synthetic phonics is an arcane base skill that should be learned before reading"
As a by-stander in all this I find the above somewhere between mystifying and alarming. If it's an arcane skill why is it taught/learned at all?
However this exchange does at least underline my original statement: measurement is is hard.
"Predominantly, irrespective of culture, people at the lower levels of organisations are hard working, ethical and honest."
But not necessarily adequately trained.
I've told this before. I did contract work that involved liaising with one of the Usual Suspects who was very keen on all the parties working on their contracts exchanging data in XML. The Usual Suspect had an ongoing contract with an Indian S/W house. They did development in the UK but with staff shipped in on, I suspect, 6 month visas from India.
My first contact was having to explain to their developer why you couldn't just have a name such as O'Neill in the middle of an element in XML and how you had to handle that apostrophe (these day's I'd have to go and look it up myself but this was a long time ago).
The problem was fixed but then every now and again an incoming document would be checked at as not well-formed XML and there would be a naked apostrophe, presumably the consequence of someone either removing code they didn't understand or adding a new bit of code and not knowing to check.
Clearly inexperienced staff were being set on the job without ever being trained on the minutiae of the XML at the core of their client's projects. In effect my client, another subcontractor, was having to may my fees to train their staff for them.
OTOH it was a relief when we ducked one of the English bullshitters they'd contracted and we could talk to the more experienced, higher level Indian staff.
For the OP's case the measures would appear to be how much of it doesn't have to be rewritten and what's the overall cost when it's ready to ship, including both the out-sourcing bill and the rewrite costs. If they have the resources they could do a comparison - cost and total elapsed time of out-sourcing plus in-house, in-house cost split out from that and cost anfd in-house time of writing from scratch with a separate in-house team.
"a global software engineering salary report this month from CodeSubmit"
Do they also produce a global software engineering quality report or a global software engineering value for money report?
I sometimes point out here that measuring things is hard. That's no excuse for substituting the measurement that's easiest for the measurement that matters.
I've also done something like that. I reckon that if there's a H/W problem it helps to have the original OS in place so I'd already made a recovery image. It was an interesting experience restoring that after the Linux functionality had been moved over to a new laptop. It wouldn't restore unless secure boot was turned off. Despite having updated itself several times it still, on the rare occasions I boot it, complains that the OneDrive S/W that came with the machine isn't the right version for the machine - although this may be because it was an ex-demo purchase when Staples were closing down.
"My problem is that if the distros come with different software versions there is no guarantee that the files stored in /home/$USER are actually compatible."
That's a problem for the application, of course. SeaMonkey and Thunderbird warn about not bing able to go back to old versions. I've found going forward isn't necessarily easy either. Having had a dig into the profile directory I can see why.
"We recommend a separate partition for /home, but that's getting fancy."
Fancy? Just a basic requirement. What it means is that if you want to try various distros or need to reinstall your existing distro* you don't lose your home directories. Getting fancy is adding /usr/local and /opt directories although Snap and Flatpak tend to replace those, probably at the expense of a lot of duplication.
One thing to be aware of is that, in Debian derivatives at least, some or your data may live in /var. MariaDb data and, if you use it, Apache web server data live there. You don't really want to lose those on a reinstall so I recommend a separate /srv partition as well and force those onto it.
* Less likely now that upgrades don't usually need a complete reinstall.
"the company is going to be clear cutting forests which are a principle means of photosynthesizing CO2"
The trees are quite transient on a geological timescale. Even if uncut the forest will reach equilibrium as trees age, die, decay and are replaced. You actually sequester more carbon in the long run if you fell the trees and store the product for a long time, say as the framework of a building.
"Listing in the US doesn't mean the HQ has to move."
It was suggested in a comment to a previous article on this topic that it does. Listing in the US does not necessarily have the same rules as listing in the UK.
The recruitment issues are a different matter. Visa issues apart if ARM doesn't want to compete on salaries with Silicon Valley (and its house prices) and the City that's a commercial decision.
Read it carefully indeed.
Perhaps you didn't read enough of it to get as far as this quote: "We would be concerned for the long term future of the company's global HQ remaining in Cambridge if Arm lists exclusively in the USA and we will always fight to defend our members jobs in Cambridge."
That was from a trade union, not an accountant, a government minister or official or a stock market representative. The union thinks it makes a difference.
Were these tracks bought via some route that involved payment to Google? No?
Maybe it's related to this: if my phone is switched off or, as is more likely, the battery has run down because I haven't used it for several days, all the apps downloaded from F-Droid disappear from the main UI pages. They can be copied - or is it linked? - back from the alphabetical list of available apps but not immediately as they're also hidden from that for several minutes. It may be a bug, it may be a gentle hint from Google that they don't like it when I fail opt not to to give them some money. Cock-up or conspiracy, take your choice, the result's the same.
Even in the non-currency security printing business things are never taken anything less than seriously. It's the high tech end of the (non-electronic) printing industry. It's not just the designs and engraving, it's also the paper and the inks including, in some cases, print that's raised above the surface of the paper.
"Here in the UK we don't have the remote locations, at least very few"
And fewer still in a T shape between Reading,Oxford, Coventry and Cambridge.
"With such a load capacity, a human body could even be put in a protective cocoon and flown to another hospital if some emergency treatment was needed."
And when the medically unattended passenger is DoA it'll be a bit of a problem determining place of death.
No paper of this nature should be given credence unless its authors are prepared to expose themselves in the way they'd expose others: they should include all their online credentials for banking, shopping, email and everything else.
If they do include such details then the paper shouldn't be given credence as the authors are either outright liars or stupid.
"I'm a fan of the jury system. Pick people at random."
I vaguely remember on jury trial. Accused was a hospital worker. Petty thefts of patients' ' property started when he was put on the ward. Some property was marked with a powder. He wasn't caught with the property on him but he did have the marker. Thefts stopped when he was removed from the ward.
Not guilty.
Touch wood it seems to have stopped.
At least it wasn't just me. I started getting these alerts on a couple of accounts coincident with going on holiday and logging in from a different location. When they continued when I got back I thought MS were getting just a tad too suspicious. I should have realised that incompetence was more likely than an excess of competence.
Drilling down through the links in the Microsoft waffle I find the statement: "we defend our customers’ data from improper access by any government in the world."
I take it that a demand under the CLOUD Act would not be considered "improper" because it's sanctioned by law. In fact I recall Microsoft were pleased at the Act's passing, not, as far as I can make out, because it strengthened their hand when some US functionary didn't want to go through the proper channels in Ireland, but because it clarified things for them. US functionary now says "jump" and Microsoft can jump without any comeback from the affected customer.
Drilling further I find out how they're going to do this: "a contractual commitment to challenge government requests for data". "Challenge" not "defy". I read this as saying that they'll make sure that a demand under the CLOUD Act meets its requirements and is, therefore, proper.
What seems to be needed is an arm's length agreement whereby the EU data centres would be run by a self-contained EU-owned business over which neither Microsoft nor any other business within legislative reach of any non-EU government had any power to demand access. Does it provide for this?
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